OS X 10.11 El Capitan is on track to debut Wednesday, Apple confirmed with a press release, reminding customers that they will be able to install the free update from the Mac App Store.

"People love using their Macs, and one of the biggest reasons is the power and ease-of-use of OS X," said Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering. "El Capitan refines the Mac experience and improves performance in a lot of little ways that make a very big difference. Feedback from our OS X beta program has been incredibly positive and we think customers are going to love their Macs even more with El Capitan."

Tuesday's press release indicates that OS X El Capitan is on schedule to meet its previously announced Sept. 30 launch date. The company did hit a last-minute snag earlier this month that delayed watchOS 2 for a few days, though iOS 9 also arrived on schedule.

El Capitan supports all Macs introduced in 2009 or later, and some models introduced in 2007 and 2008.

To hype the launch, Apple is focusing on refinements to the Mac experience, and improvements to system performance.

Specifically, refinements have been made with regards to window management, built-in apps and Spotlight search. Performance improvements include also make activities like launching and switching apps, opening PDFs and accessing email faster and more responsive.

New features in El Capitan include Split View, an enhanced Mission Control, a cursor spotting feature, better fullscreen view in Mail, an improved Notes app, the ability to quickly spot and mute tabs in Safari, and other general refinements and tweaks.

Hopefully the OS X update will not transfer the iOS 9 mail issue with pop/smtp email accounts. The iOS 9 upgrade removed all downloaded and archived emails from all our devices and removes the content of new emails after about 12 hours. IMAP email accounts are fine, pop/smtp accounts almost unusable - there are multiple threads on the apple user forum and the support desks have confirmed a patch is being worked on. If this issue also hit the Mac we would lose our whole email archive. I'm not a beta tester and therefore have no evidence to back up the concern but would be interested to know if anyone else using the beta and pop/smtp email accounts can give any feedback.

Well I'm still on Mavericks so I'll likely wait a little while longer and see what is stuffed this time. Once upon a time, most Apple OS releases just worked.

Whatever!!!

Once upon a time is the correct phrase for your rose tinted, fairy story recollections of a bygone Apple golden age. It's complicated and they do a whole lot better than most. Not perfect by any stretch, but try to put the issues in perspective with everything that does work.

For those people here who have been installing the betas, are you satisfied that the lingering bugs have been squashed?

I have been using it with only 1 bug when I have mail opened but the window closed for no reason later the window opens by itself and I have to click on a different folder then back to the in folder to see what is written, so now I just hide mail until I want to use it. I have sent a report to Apple.

Well I'm still on Mavericks so I'll likely wait a little while longer and see what is stuffed this time. Once upon a time, most Apple OS releases just worked.

I've been using Apple products since the 80s, and I'm going to have to call this statement rose-colored glasses looking back in hindsight. I don't know of any time that I didn't have to be wary of applications breaking or possible bugs happening once the OS started being used by millions outside the development lab. At the workplaces where I or colleagues covered IT, OS versions were usually at least one if not two versions behind release in order to keep everyone in the organization on a common platform that was known to work (and issues were known in order to fix them quickly) while the IT people tested and prepared rolling out the newer OS versions. This has only become more noticeable now as Apple products become more widespread and the OSes themselves become more complex.

Being still on Mavericks is just fine. Doing so because of the idea that there was a golden age when everything was perfect and nothing ever went wrong rather than because of some mission critical reason is mistaken and likely holding people back from some nice things.

What does Split View do, windows already snap to the left and right of the screen. Will it also include an app switcher like in iOS 9, that would be useful.

Split View allows you to select 2 programs and Mac OS will create a new full-screen view (Apple used to call them Spaces) for you to work in 2 programs side-by-side. It's very similar to the new Split View function in iOS 9.

For those people here who have been installing the betas, are you satisfied that the lingering bugs have been squashed?

The issue isn't always that the OS has a bug but that developers don't get their software updates to coincide with the release. I just got an email from Native Instruments that some of their software is not compatible. Now maybe they have been working on it for months and not found the solution but till they do, if you depend on their software and you update then you will be sidelined by the bugs whoever is to blame. I doubt that NI is the only company not to have their updates ready yet.

I've been using Apple products since the 80s, and I'm going to have to call this statement rose-colored glasses looking back in hindsight. I don't know of any time that I didn't have to be wary of applications breaking or possible bugs happening once the OS started being used by millions outside the development lab. At the workplaces where I or colleagues covered IT, OS versions were usually at least one if not two versions behind release in order to keep everyone in the organization on a common platform that was known to work (and issues were known in order to fix them quickly) while the IT people tested and prepared rolling out the newer OS versions. This has only become more noticeable now as Apple products become more widespread and the OSes themselves become more complex.

Being still on Mavericks is just fine. Doing so because of the idea that there was a golden age when everything was perfect and nothing ever went wrong rather than because of some mission critical reason is mistaken and likely holding people back from some nice things.

Split View allows you to select 2 programs and Mac OS will create a new full-screen view (Apple used to call them Spaces) for you to work in 2 programs side-by-side. It's very similar to the new Split View function in iOS 9.

I use a pretty awesome app called SizeUp for that. Allows you to reshape windows and move them around with keystrokes. Great fro splitting windows vertically and horizontally as well as maximizing the screen without going into full screen.